Lives in Cricket No 19 - Frank Sugg

organist. Frank senior might have had plans for Frank Reginald to be actively involved in his growing sports business once his schooling, at Merchant Taylors’ School at Great Crosby just outside Liverpool, was out of the way. If so, these expectations were soon put aside. In due course, the young man had shares in the business and, as we shall see in a later chapter, he had an influence in a key decision that led to the splitting of the company into two separate businesses. But he had no active and continuing role in Frank’s business. The reins of the business remained firmly in the hands of Frank and his brother Walter until its collapse in the mid 1920s. After service in France during the First World War, Frank Reginald joined the civil service. He worked in the Newcastle offices of the Ministry of Labour and on retirement moved to the Isle of Wight. For a brief period, including while he was in the Army, Frank Reginald chose to be known as Frank Reginald Howe-Sugg. I have not been able to discover the reason. Perhaps by incorporating his father’s second forename into his own surname, Frank Reginald wanted to associate himself more closely with his father and perhaps distance himself from Walter Sugg’s branch of the family, with whom his father’s relationships were not of the happiest. But that is speculation. After the death of his first wife, Frank Reginald married Mabel Coleman, who had been his housekeeper, in 1919 in Tynemouth. Both marriages were childless so the male line of Frank’s branch of the family was extinguished on Frank Reginald’s own death in 1963. Frank and Amy Sugg also had three daughters, all born in Liverpool: Margery Helen Mary, in 1900; Eva Kathleen, in 1906; and Amy Winifred Howe, in 1910. All married in due course, Margery (known as Margot in the family) and Eva (known as Kath) having families of their own. Kath and her husband Richard Tippin had two daughters, Janet and Lorna. Lorna, born in Harrogate but brought up in Sheffield, married John Hawksley-Wood. The marriage failed and in 1971 she was remarried to Tom Brown, a businessman in the pharmaceutical industry. Widowed, she now lives near Dover. She has been a useful source of information about her grandfather. Lorna Brown has told me that her mother and her mother’s sisters all revered Frank. ‘I never heard a bad word said about him in the Marriage and Family 65